Bloodlines (Foreword by Tim Keller) E-Book

John Piper

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 475

Beschreibung

Genocide. Terrorism. Hate crimes. In a world where racism is far from dead, is unity amidst diversities even remotely possible? Sharing from his own experiences growing up in the segregated South, pastor John Piper thoughtfully exposes the unremitting problem of racism. Instead of turning finally to organizations, education, famous personalities, or government programs to address racial strife, Piper reveals the definitive source of hope—teaching how the good news about Jesus Christ actively undermines the sins that feed racial strife, and leads to a many-colored and many-cultured kingdom of God. Learn to pursue ethnic harmony from a biblical perspective, and to relate to real people different from yourself, as you take part in the bloodline of Jesus that is comprised of "every tongue, tribe, and nation."

Leseprobe

“Americans have been turning to organizations, education, famous personalities, and ultimately government in an effort to address the ongoing racial strife in our nation. In 2008 many hoped the election of an African-American president would finally bridge the racial divide. Today, we are left wondering why racial tensions have not abated. John Piper argues from specific biblical texts that the only solution powerful enough to overcome racial strife and bring about reconciliation and harmony is the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is this gospel that announces that, through his blood, Jesus has demolished the dividing wall that separates humanity along racial lines and has brought all ethnicities together as brothers and sisters into one body—the church. Yet Piper does not end there. He carefully shepherds us through the various implications of the gospel in relation to race and ethnicity. In this sense, the book you hold in your hands is so much more than a book about race and ethnicity. Bloodlines is a prime example of how we are to do the hard work of renewing our minds by replacing old ways of thinking with gospel ways of thinking. Read this book and let it serve as a model of how to prepare your mind for action and to think soberly about God, your sin, Christ, the gospel, and one another for the sake of your soul, Christ’s church, and God’s glory.”

Juan R. SanchezJr., Preaching Pastor, High Pointe Baptist Church, Austin, Texas

“John Piper has given us an exquisite work on the matter of race. He addresses the issue with biblical and theological soundness coupled with personal sensitivity and practical advice. This is a must read for those who wish to pursue unity God’s way.”

Tony Evans, President, The Urban Alternative; Senior Pastor, Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship

“For years, I have yearned for a biblically sound, theologically anchored resource on race. God has answered that prayer. Leaping off the pages of Bloodlines is the power of the gospel to overcome and defeat racism and a call to cross-centered, holy justice in our attitudes and actions toward those who are not like us. This is an important, foundational work, and I am sure it will be used of God to remind all of us of the power and precious, priceless dignity of the gospel.”

Crawford W. Loritts Jr., author; speaker; radio host; Senior Pastor, Fellowship Bible, Roswell, Georgia

“Piper bequeaths an outstanding—and at times, risky—work on race and ethnicity, thoroughly soaked in the biblical Christian Hedonism worldview. I found that Piper’s personal testimony from the 1960s until now and his exploration of African-American writers past and present demonstrate the complexity of dealing honestly with the topic for those who seek to honor the Savior. He is right: on race, ‘we have fallen together.’ The only question that remains is whether or not individual members of the church will take deeply to heart this sincere analysis of the cross of Christ and race and then become a steadfast holy force for undoing the problems of racism in the world.”

Eric C. Redmond, author, Where Are All the Brothers? Straight Answers to Men’s Questions about the Church; council member, The Gospel Coalition

BLOODLINES

Other Crossway Books by John Piper

What’s the Difference?

A Hunger for God

God’s Passion for His Glory

The Innkeeper

Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ

The Legacy of Sovereign Joy

The Hidden Smile of God

Counted Righteous in Christ

The Misery of Job and the Mercy of God

The Roots of Endurance

Don’t Waste Your Life

Fifty Reasons Jesus Came to Die

The Prodigal’s Sister

When I Don’t Desire God

God Is the Gospel

What Jesus Demands from the World

When the Darkness Will Not Lift

Contending for Our All

The Future of Justification

Spectacular Sins

This Momentary Marriage

Filling Up the Afflictions of Christ

John Calvin and His Passion for the Majesty of God

Velvet Steel

Ruth

Sweet and Bitter Providence

Think

Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian

Copyright © Desiring God Foundation

Published by Crossway

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                    Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Josh Dennis

First printing 2011

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are from The New American Standard Bible®. Copyright © The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-2852-1

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-2853-8

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-2854-5

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-2855-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Piper, John, 1946–

Bloodlines : race, cross, and the Christian / John Piper ; foreword

by Tim Keller.

          p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-2852-1 (hc)

1. Reconciliation—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Race

discrimination—Religious aspects—Christianity. 3. Church and

minorities. I. Title.

BT738.27.P57       2011

270.089—dc22                                                2011010732

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

LB     20     19     18    17     16    15    14     13     12     11 14   13   12   11   10     9    8    7     6    5    4     3     2     1

To

Talitha Ruth

Daughter by love and law,

sister in the Great Bloodline

CONTENTS

Foreword by Tim Keller

11

Preface

13

A Note to the Reader on Race and Racism

17

PART ONE

OUR WORLD: THE NEED FOR THE GOSPEL

Introduction

Martin Luther King Jr.: What Was It Like for Those Who Weren’t There?

23

SECTION ONE

My Story, My Debt, My World: Why I Wrote the Book

1 My Story: From Greenville to Bethlehem

31

2 The Gospel I Love, the Debt I Owe, and the Church I Serve

43

3 Global Shifting and the New Face of the Church

51

SECTION TWO

Black and White and the Blood of Jesus

4 Why This Book Gives Prominence to Black-White Relationships

59

5 Personal Responsibility and Systemic Intervention

71

6 The Power of the Gospel and the Roots of Racial Strife

87

PART TWO

GOD’S WORD: THE POWER OF THE GOSPEL

Introduction

William Wilberforce: The Importance of Doctrine and “Coronary” Commitment

109

SECTION ONE

The Accomplishment of the Gospel

7 The Mission of Jesus and the End of Ethnocentrism

115

8 The Creation of One New Humanity by the Blood of Christ

121

9 Ransomed for God from Every Tribe

129

10 Every People Justified the Same Way

147

SECTION TWO

The Application of the Gospel

11 Dying with Christ for the Sake of Christ-Exalting Diversity

159

12 Living in Sync with Gospel Freedom

169

13 The Law of Liberty and the Peril of Partiality

181

SECTION THREE

The Ultimate Goal of the Gospel

14 Why Is It Worth the Death of His Son?

193

SECTION FOUR

Two Issues: Interracial Marriage and Prejudice

15 Interracial Marriage

203

16 Probability, Prejudice, and Christ

217

Conclusion: Confession, Warning, Plea

227APPENDICES

Appendix 1: Is There Such a Thing as Race? A Word about Terminology

234

Appendix 2: The Sovereignty of God and the Soul Dynamic: God-Centered Theology and the Black Experience in America

241

Appendix 3: How and Why Bethlehem Baptist Church Pursues Ethnic Diversity

256

Appendix 4: What Are the Implications of Noah’s Curse?

263

Notes

268

Subject Index

281

Name Index

285

Scripture Index

289

Desiring God: A Note on Resources

295

FOREWORD

I was excited when I learned that John Piper was writing a book on race and the gospel of the cross. When John gave me the privilege of reading the manuscript, I devoured it and found that despite my high expectations I was not disappointed. It was helpful to me personally, helpful to me theologically (in understanding the relevance of the gospel to racial conflict), and it was especially encouraging to me to think that many in the evangelical world would read it.

John and I are both old enough to remember the complicity of evangelical churches and institutions with the systemic racism in the US before the civil rights movement. I took my first church in a small town in the South in the early 1970s. The courts had recently ruled that the whites-only public swimming pool, operated by the town with taxpayers’ money, had to be integrated. So what did the town do? It shut the pool down completely, and the white people of the town opened a new private swimming pool and club, which of course, did not have to admit racial minorities. Because I was a young pastor, our family was often invited to swim there, and swim we did, not really cognizant of what the pool represented.

One of the reasons I think this book is so important is that conservative evangelicals (particularly white ones) seem to have become more indifferent to the sin of racism during my lifetime. Why? One reason, of course, is the stubbornness of the sinful heart. We never want to hear about what is wrong with us. Another factor may be cultural. Many have made racism and prejudice virtually the only thing they will still call a “sin,” and they often lay the guilt for thesin of racism at the doorstep of those who are social conservatives. Because of that, many who identify themselves as conservatives simply don’t want to hear about racism anymore. They give lip service to it being a sin, but they associate any sustained denunciation of racism with the liberal or secular systems of thought. John’s book, which you have in your hands, is a strong antidote to this misconception. His motivation is simply as a preacher of the Word to bring to light what God says in it regarding race and racism.

There are many ways in which this book will help the church in its struggle with the sin of racism. First, John takes us to all the biblical texts that speak most directly to the subject of race. But—and this was most helpful to me—John does not stop there. He then goes to most of the central doctrines and themes of our faith and shows the implications of each one for our understanding of race. He demonstrates how Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom, his substitutionary atonement, the doctrine of conversion, of union with Christ, of justification by faith—all transform our attitude toward our own race and culture as well as to those belonging to other races and cultures.

I won’t ever forget how one of the elders in my first church, who had been growing in his understanding of the gospel and of the cross of Jesus, said to me, “You know, I realize I’ve been a racist all my life.” I hadn’t spoken to him of racism at all, but as he was going deeper into the theology of grace, he connected the dots for himself. I must say that most of us are not that insightful, and that’s why we need this volume. Let John Piper connect the dots for you.

Tim Keller      

February 2011

PREFACE

As I prepare to send Bloodlines into a world of ethnic and racial discord, I thank God that he has spoken. We are not left to ourselves. We humans have never had the resources in ourselves to love each other well across ethnic lines. There is too much selfishness in all of us.

But God has told us what we must do. And he has sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to do what we can’t and to give us new power to do what we must. His death for us, and his Spirit in us, can make a world of difference.

God has told us not to murder (Ex. 20:13). He has told us to love our neighbor as ourselves (Lev. 19:18; Gal. 5:14)—including the neighbor who is an enemy (Matt. 5:44). He has told us to do good to everyone (Gal. 6:10)—including those who hate us (Luke 6:27). He has told us to be peacemakers (Matt. 5:9) and to treat others the way we would like to be treated (Matt. 7:12).

He has revealed to us that every human is created in the image of God (James 3:9). He has shown us that we all have the same human father and are therefore kinsmen by blood (Acts 17:26). And he has made clear that, when his Son died on the cross for our sins, he “ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9). Racial harmony is a blood issue, not just a social issue.

God has spoken. And he has acted. He has entered our world in the person of his Son. His word, his action, and his incarnation are the end of ethnic arrogance for those who embrace him as the Treasure of their lives.

The bloodline of Jesus Christ is deeper than the bloodlines of race. The death and resurrection of the Son of God for sinners is the only sufficient power to bring the bloodlines of race into the single bloodline of the cross.

Therefore, this book has a center. It has a heart. If I had to boil it down, I would send you to chapters 6, 9, 15, and the conclusion. But hearts don’t exist without bodies. And so the rest of the book matters.

I tell my sad and thankful story in chapters 1 and 2 and set the stage globally in chapter 3. In chapter 4 I explain why black-white relations get prominence, when the contemporary picture of diversity is far more complex. Chapter 5 takes me in over my head to the complexities of personal and structural causes for race-related disadvantages. But better to aim at understanding and fall short than to surrender at the outset.

Chapter 6 is the center, where the gospel shines as the God-given remedy for ten deadly realities that lie at the root of racial strife. Chapters 7–14 give the biblical exposition that lies at the foundation of everything else. Chapter 15 tackles the issue of interracial marriage, which I think is still just beneath the surface of many racial tensions. And chapter 16 wrestles with the inevitability and necessity of forming pre-judgments and how they relate to negative prejudices.

Now there are stories to tell, and problems to solve, and complexities to ponder, but in the end the good news of what Jesus has done, in dying and rising again to bear our sins and bring us to God, will make all the difference. Only Jesus can bring the bloodlines of race into the single bloodline of the cross and give us peace. Everything was made through him and for him (Col. 1:16). Therefore he will get the glory for this too. “All the families of the nations shall worship before [him]” (Ps. 22:27).

I am thankful to my wife, Noël, and daughter, Talitha, for the support they have been to me during the writing of this book. Again the elders of our church have made this book possible by giving me a writing leave each year, and even a few extra days this time, because of the unusual challenges of this book. David Mathis, my fellow elder and executive pastoral assistant, along with Nathan Miller, has managed my life for me, and provided innumerable helps that freed me to do this kind of thinking and writing. Finally, the people of Bethlehem—the flock I love to feed—have been a joy to serve. Without their peace and partnership, I could not flourish in the ministry. God has been good to me.

John Piper                     

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Maundy Thursday 2011

A NOTE TO THE READER ON RACE AND RACISM

I’m a stickler for clear definitions. I like to know what I am talking about. If you would rather just pick up my meaning as you go along, feel free to skip this section and go straight to the introduction. Stories are always more interesting.

Believe it or not, the existence of the reality of race itself is disputed. I mean seriously disputed by very wise people whom I admire. I deal with this in appendix 1. And, of course, the term racism is ambiguous as well.

It seems to me that it is a healthy sign to wish that the term race did not exist. It has not served well to enhance human relations. As we use it, it is not a biblical category. We may not be able to communicate in our day without the term, but we can at least try to show why it’s a fuzzy term that has often been hijacked by ideology for racist purposes.

RACE IS MORE COMPLEX THAN COLOR—BUT NOT LESS

Nevertheless, in this book I have not tried to abandon the terms race and racial. As loaded as the terms are, they are too embedded in our language and in the thousands of books and articles and sermons and lectures and conversations that make up the world we must relate to. There is no escaping this historically, and, in the present day, the problems we face are conceived along racial lines understood mainly as color lines.

For example, in 1900 W. E. B. Du Bois delivered a speech to the First Pan-African Conference at Westminster Hall, London, and began like this:

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question as to how far differences of race—which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair—will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.1

I will not begrudge Du Bois the use of the term race in this sense. This is history. And it is still the way the race issue is powerfully formulated today. Unless I explicitly differentiate race and racial from ethnicity and ethnic, I would like you, the reader, to think of both when I mention either—that is, ethnicity with a physical component and race with a cultural component. Very often I use the terms together to draw out this combination of ideas.

RACISM VALUES ONE RACE OVER ANOTHER

With regard to the term racism, it is possible to get oneself tied in so many knots that it feels hopeless to define. Several years ago, we spent months as a pastoral staff at our church trying to come up with a working definition. I never thought defining a single word could be so difficult. But I am simply going to cut the knot with a decision to work with someone else’s definition.

In the summer of 2004, the Presbyterian Church in America settled on the following definition, which I find helpful: “Racism is an explicit or implicit belief or practice that qualitatively distinguishes or values one race over other races.”2 In spite of saying above that I usually use the term race with cultural connotations (ethnicity), in this definition I am thinking of race primarily in terms of physical features. I am making a distinction between race and ethnicity.

The reason is that, since ethnicity includes beliefs and attitudes and behaviors, we are biblically and morally bound to value some aspects of some ethnicities over others. Where such valuing is truly rooted in biblical teaching about good and evil, this should not be called racism. There are aspects of every culture, including our own (whoever “our” is), which are sinful and in need of transformation. So the definition of racism here leaves room for assessing cultures on the basis of a biblical standard.

The focus of this definition of racism is on the heart and behavior of the racist. The heart that believes one race is more valuable than another is a sinful heart. And that sin is called racism. The behavior that distinguishes one race as more valuable than another is a sinful behavior. And that sin is called racism. This personal focus on the term racism does not exclude the expression of this sin in structural ways—for example, laws and policies that demean or exclude on the basis of race. (See chapter 5 where I focus on the issue of structural racism.)

PART ONE

OUR WORLD: THE NEED FOR THE GOSPEL

INTRODUCTION

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

What Was It Like for Those Who Weren’t There?

A book on race written by a baby boomer,1 who came of age in the 1960s, has to begin with the civil rights movement. It still grips us, defines us, in so many ways. After slavery itself and the Civil War, no event or movement in the last four hundred years has affected the racial climate in America today more than this movement. Things were done and said in those days that need to be known by those who weren’t there. The most eloquent spokesman of the movement was Martin Luther King Jr. His vision and his description of the situation that gave rise to the movement help explain why this book exists—especially part 1, “Our World: The Need for the Gospel.”

THE LEADER

Martin Luther King Jr. was born January 15, 1929. On April 4, 1968, at 6:00 p.m., just outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, the thirty-nine-year-old King stood by the railing looking out over some rundown buildings just beyond Mulberry Street. James Earl Ray took aim with a .30 caliber rifle and blew away the right side of King’s face and neck. He was pronounced dead at St. Joseph’s Hospital an hour and five minutes later. The nonviolent voice against the rage of racism was gone.

Why would a thirty-nine-year-old man be killed? We need to teach our children this history. Some of us lived it and will never forget it. Segregation was the world we grew up in—legally mandated separation of races at all kinds of levels. Separate schools, separate motels, separate restrooms, separate swimming pools, separate drinking fountains. How could you more clearly communicate the lie that being black was like a disease? It had an unbelievably oppressive and demeaning effect on the African-American community. And it had a deadening and defiling effect on the conscience of the white community.

King did not spark the movement. He was swept into it, almost against his will. The civil rights movement had many catalysts. One of the most important happened on May 17, 1954. That was the day that the Supreme Court decided the case called Brown v. Board of Education. It declared that state-imposed segregation in the public schools was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Many scholars say that “Brown remains the most important Supreme Court decision in [the twentieth] century.”2 Some of us would say that the 1973 Roe v. Wade was equally important, only for opposite reasons. Brown tried to restore rights to an oppressed group. Roe v. Wade took rights away from an oppressed group.

Another catalyst happened about a year and a half later. On December 1, 1955, a forty-two-year-old black woman named Rosa Parks (who died October 24, 2005) refused to surrender her seat to a white man on an officially segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The black community of Montgomery rallied behind her when she was put in jail. They boycotted the buses for 381 days. The leader of the movement—by no choice of his own—was the twenty-six-year-old pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. And with that leadership, he became the unrivaled leader of the movement until his death thirteen years later. No one spoke in that cause with more influence.

“THE MOST ELOQUENT AND LEARNED EXPRESSION”

Martin Luther King called for freedoms and rights and justice that were long overdue. And he did it with an appeal to historic Christian vision, with amazing rhetorical skill, without condoning violence, and with unprecedented and lasting success. That’s why there is a holiday in his honor. One of his writings in particular provides a window on the mid-twentieth-century world of black Americans—“Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

The place is Birmingham, Alabama. The time is April 11, 1963. I was seventeen years old in Greenville, South Carolina. At the Gaston Motel, Room 30, Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Wyatt Walker, and Fred Shuttlesworth decided to lead a peaceful, nonviolent demonstration the next day, Good Friday, against the racial injustices of the city.

As in most Southern cities in those days (including the one I was growing up in 350 miles away) bus seating was segregated; schools, parks, lunch counters, restrooms, drinking fountains—they were almost all segregated. Some called Birmingham the most segregated city in the country. Its bombings and torchings of black churches and homes had given it the name “Bombingham”—and “the Johannesburg of the South.”

There was one catch. The sheriff, Bull Connor, had served Martin Luther King with a state-court injunction that prohibited him and other movement leaders from conducting demonstrations. With a wife and four children back home in Atlanta, King decided to violate the injunction, pursue a peaceful, nonviolent demonstration, and willingly go to jail. On Good Friday, King led his fifty volunteers downtown, up to the police line, came face-to-face with Connor, and knelt down with Ralph Abernathy in prayer. He and all the demonstrators were thrown into paddy wagons and put in jail.

On Tuesday, April 16, King was shown a copy of the BirminghamNews,which contained a letter from eight Christian and Jewish clergymen of Alabama (all white), criticizing King for his demonstration. In response, King wrote what has come to be called “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and which one biographer described as “the most eloquent and learned expression of the goals and philosophy of the nonviolent movement ever written.”3

WHAT IT WAS LIKE—FOR THOSE WHO WEREN’T THERE

We need to hear the power and insight with which King spoke to my generation in the sixties—enraging thousands and inspiring thousands. The white clergy had all said he should be more patient, wait, and not demonstrate. He wrote:

Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society;

. . . when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people;

. . . when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”;

. . . when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.4

To the charge that he was an extremist, he responded like this:

Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.”

Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This this nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . . ” So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremist we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?5

And finally he delivered a powerful call to the church, which rings as true today as it did in 1963:

There was a time when the church was very powerful—in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. . . .

But the judgment of God is upon the church [today] as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.6

That is Martin Luther King’s prophetic voice ringing out of the Birmingham jail in 1963.

HOW MUCH HAS CHANGED IN THE HEART?

Many things have changed since 1963. And some deep things have not changed. Let me illustrate. There are probably more vicious white supremacists in America today than there were in 1968. The victims are as likely to be Latinos or Somali immigrants as African Americans whose ancestors have been here for centuries. The Ku Klux Klan has no corner on hate anymore.

On June 7, 1998—that’s ’98, not ’68—outside Jasper, Texas, James Byrd, a forty-nine-year-old African American, was beaten and chained by his ankles to the back of a pickup truck and dragged two miles until his head ripped off. The perpetrators had racist tattoos, one of them depicting a black person hanging from a tree. Many things have changed in the last forty years, but in some people some deep things haven’t changed. There is still plenty of hate.

MORE THAN BLACK AND WHITE—BUT NOT LESS

I am aware that the issue of race relations is bigger and more complex than black and white relations in this country. I’ve devoted a chapter to the wider global reality we are facing (chapter 3), and another to why this book is especially (though not exclusively) focused on black-white relations (chapter 4). But we will do well not to speak in too many broad generalizations when dealing with race. Better to anchor our thoughts to the real world. And in the real world, people are one thing and not another. They may be complex, but they are not generalities. They are specific human beings. Focusing on my own history, and the black-white reality in particular, has helped me keep my feet on the ground and my heart connected to real people.

Part 1 of this book focuses on our world, as part 2 focuses on God’s Word. Or we might say, part 1 deals with the issues raised by natural bloodlines, and part 2 deals with the new line stemming not from natural blood but from the shed blood of Jesus. What we will see in part 1 is that the world we live in is a world where only the gospel of Jesus Christ can bring the kind of racial and ethnic harmony that we were made to enjoy.

SECTION ONE

MY STORY, MY DEBT, MY WORLD: WHY I WROTE THE BOOK

Remember not the sins of my youth

or my transgressions;

according to your steadfast love remember me,

for the sake of your goodness, O LORD!

PSALM 25:7

CHAPTER ONE

MY STORY: FROM GREENVILLE TO BETHLEHEM

Barack Obama, in a new preface to his older book Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, quotes William Faulkner to show that history is never dead. He describes the difference between the time when the book was written and the time he was writing the new preface.

The book was first published in 1995 “against a backdrop of Silicon Valley and a booming stock market; the collapse of the Berlin Wall; Mandela—in slow, sturdy steps—emerging from prison to lead a country; the signing of peace accords in Oslo.”1 He observed that there was a rising global optimism as writers announced the end of our fractured history, “the ascendance of free markets, and liberal democracy, the replacement of old hatreds and wars between nations with virtual communities and battle for market share.”2

“And then,” he says, “on September 11, 2001, the world fractured.”

“History returned that day with a vengeance; . . . in fact, as Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried—it isn’t even past. This collective history, this past, directly touches my own.”3

GROWING UP IN GREENVILLE

This is true about the story of race in America. It is certainly true in relation to me. “This collective history, this past, directly touches my own.” I was born in 1946 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and from the time I was six months old, I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina. I left for college eighteen years later and spent four years in Wheaton, Illinois; three years in Pasadena, California; three years in Munich, Germany; and the rest of my life in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. But those early years in South Carolina are the roots of my racial burden.

The population of South Carolina in 1860 was about 700,000. Sixty percent were African Americans (420,000), and all but 9,000 of these were slaves. That’s a mere 150 years ago—only fifty-nine years before my father was born. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union, largely in protest over Abraham Lincoln’s election as an anti-slavery president and the implications that had for states’ rights. Three weeks later, the Civil War began in Charleston, South Carolina.

Over four years later, on April 9, 1865, the war ended with the surrender of Southern general Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House. Ninety years later, when I was nine years old in Greenville, the enforced segregation was almost absolute: drinking fountains, public restrooms, public schools, public swimming pools, bus seating, housing, restaurants, hospital waiting rooms, dentist waiting rooms, bus station waiting rooms, and—with their own kind of enforcement—churches, including mine. I can tell you from the inside that, for all the rationalized glosses, it was not “separate but equal.” It was not respectful, it was not just, it was not loving, and therefore it was not Christian. It was ugly and demeaning. And, as we will see, because of my complicity I have much to be sorry about.

Which is one reason this book focuses so heavily on the gospel of Jesus Christ. I owe my life and hope to the gospel. Without it I would still be strutting with racist pride, or I would be suffering the moral paralysis of “white guilt.”4 But the gospel has an answer to both pride and guilt. I hope this book makes that plain.

GROWING UP BLACK IN GREENVILLE

Three and a half miles across town from where I grew up, in the same city, five years older than I, another little boy was growing up on the other side of the racial divide. His name was Jesse Jackson.

Jackson was born October 8, 1941, at his home on 20 Haynie Street. His biographer describes the boyhood neighborhood:

A dingy warren of flimsy little houses, with plank porch railings ranked with rusted coffee cans that, in the summer, held rufflings of geraniums and caladiums. Each house was perched on a tiny, grassless, rutted yard, some scattered with wood chips and upturned washtubs and old tires and bluish puddles of pitched-out dishwater, others whisked clean with straw brooms and enclosed by spindly fences assembled out of scraps of boards and wire, with walkways bordered by bits of brick and cement block and broken bottles set in neat parallel lines in the dirt.5

In 1953, Jackson's family moved to a newly constructed housing project, Fieldcrest Village (later called Jesse Jackson Town homes)—3 miles to the east. Our worlds were so close and yet so far apart. His mother, Helen, loved the same Christian radio station my mother did—WMUU, the voice of Bob Jones University. But there was a big difference. The very school that broadcast all that Bible truth would not admit blacks. And the large, white Baptist church four miles from Jesse Jackson’s home wouldn’t either. Nor would mine.

This was my hometown. And there is no mystery in it as to why a young black man growing up there—or a Martin Luther King growing up in Atlanta a generation earlier—would get his theological education at a liberal institution (such as Chicago Theological Seminary or Crozer Theological Seminary). Our fundamental and evangelical schools—and almost every other institution—especially in the South, were committed to segregation.

I WAS A RACIST

I was, in those years, manifestly racist. As a child and a teenager my attitudes and actions assumed the superiority of my race in almost every way without knowing or wanting to know anybody who was black, except Lucy. Lucy came to our house on Saturdays to help my mother clean. I liked Lucy, but the whole structure of the relationship was demeaning. Those who defend the noble spirit of Southern slaveholders by pointing to how nice they were to their slaves, and how deep the affections were, and how they even attended each other’s personal celebrations, seem to be naïve about what makes a relationship degrading.

No, she was not a slave. But the point still stands. Of course, we were nice. Of course, we loved Lucy. Of course, she was invited to my sister’s wedding. As long as she and her family “knew their place.” Being nice to, and having strong affections for, and including in our lives is what we do for our dogs too. It doesn’t say much about honor and respect and equality before God. My affections for Lucy did not provide the slightest restraint on my racist mouth when I was with my friends.

MY MOTHER: GUTSY YANKEE FUNDAMENTALIST

My demeaning attitude was not mainly my parents’ fault. In fact, in some ways, it was in spite of my parents that I was a racist. My mother, who grew up in Pennsylvania, literally washed my mouth out with soap once for saying, “Shut up!” to my sister. She would have washed my mouth out with gasoline if she knew how foul my mouth was racially when she wasn’t around.

In 1962 my home church voted not to allow blacks into the services.6 The rationale, as I remember, was that in the heated context of the civil rights era, the only reason blacks would want to be there would be political, which is not what church is for. As I recall, my mother was the lone voice on that Wednesday night to vote no on this motion. I could be wrong about that. But she did vote no.

In December of that year, my sister was married in the church, and my mother invited Lucy’s whole family to come. And they came. I remember an incredibly tense and awkward moment as they came in the door of the foyer (which must have taken incredible courage). The ushers did not know what to do. One was about to usher them to the balcony (which had barely been used since the church was built). My mother—all five feet, two inches of her—intervened and by herself took them by the arm and seated them on the main floor of the sanctuary.

She was, under God, the seed of my salvation in more ways than one. As I watched that drama, I knew deep down that my attitudes were an offense to my mother and to her God. Oh, how thankful I am for the conviction and courage of my gutsy, Yankee, fundamentalist mother.7

URBANA ’67

My college years were fairly insulated. This was not the fault of Wheaton College. There was plenty of activism and political engagement among students and faculty at the time. It was owing to my own retiring and timid bent (another story that I tell elsewhere8). I would describe myself as simply disengaged from the wider social and political world for most of my college days. Large things were happening intellectually and spiritually, but they were happening in the furnace of my soul, not in the fires burning in urban America.9

One of the most memorable moments of my awakening from the sinful oblivion of racism was during my senior year in college. Noël, whom I married a year later, came with me to the great Urbana Missions Conference in December 1967. During a question-and-answer time before thousands of students, we heard Warren Webster, general director of the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society, and former missionary to Pakistan, answer a student’s question: What if your daughter falls in love with a Pakistani while you’re on the mission field and wants to marry him?

The question was clearly asked from a standpoint of concern that this would be a racial or ethnic dilemma for Webster. (This was four months before Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.) With great forcefulness, Webster said something like: “Better a Christian Pakistani than a godless white American!” I think the answer was even more colorful than that (perhaps including a reference to a rich American banker. But I’m not sure—Whatever the wording, the impact on Noël and me was profound. From that moment, I knew I had a lot of homework to do. The perceived wrongness of interracial marriage had been for me one of the unshakable reasons why segregation was right.

THE FULLER SEMINARY YEARS

In the year that I finished Wheaton and started seminary in California, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. It was April 4, 1968. These were explosive days, and I was fortunate to have seminary professors who cared about the issues and were committed to finding the biblical perspective on racial relations. One of those professors, Paul Jewett, compiled a 208-page syllabus of readings for us called “Readings in Racial Prejudice.”

These readings were absolutely shocking. I had never seen or heard anything like this in my life. I still have this syllabus on the shelf across the room in front of me right now in my study. I could not read about the crimes of vicious hatred toward blacks and come away without trembling. Jewett’s introduction to that syllabus ends like this:

And now let us listen to the groans of Frederick Douglass, feel the lash with Amy, endure the satire of Du Bois, and measure the wrath of Malcolm X; let us contemplate the pathos of black childhood and the tragedy of black womanhood. And let us not forget that [as Martin Luther King Jr. said] “he who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” And let us also remember that if God has given us a revelation of the true nature of man, surely we will render account if we do not live in the light of that revelation, and especially so if we are called to the holy office of the Christian ministry.10

Finally, in a class on ethics with the imposing figure of Professor Lewis Smedes in the spring of 1971, I faced head-on the biblical question of interracial marriage. I did a research project and wrote a paper called “The Ethics of Interracial Marriage.” I have it here in front of me on the desk as I write. It was typed on the kind of sticky white paper that let you erase typing ink without using Wite-Out. He wrote six comments in the margin and gave me an A–.

Smedes was a realist, as the title of one of his best books shows (Love within Limits: A Realist’s View of 1 Corinthians 13).11 He approved of my exegesis and what I wrote in conclusion:

Since . . . opposition to interracial marriage tends to perpetuate discrimination, the neighbors to whom one must be loving in this situation are not only the spouses and children of the interracial marriage. The welfare of society as a whole and the rights of the race discriminated against come into view.

However, his realism moved him to write in the margin:

This is a tough question, I think, especially at the present [1971]. It is extremely hard to see the positive effect of specific interracial marriages. Perhaps Black identity stress at present makes the positive effect of interracial marriage even less clear. I suspect we are left, for the present, with the burden of destroying discrimination while accepting the minimal of interracial marriage whose goodness has to be evaluated in terms of expediencies rather than absolute moral principles.

I doubt that Smedes would talk this way today (he died December 19, 2002). I don’t know. His hesitancy to give a wholehearted affirmation to the goodness of interracial marriage was rooted in his desire not to minimize the struggle for the intrinsic worth of authentic black identity. My own take, then and now, given what I knew from my own background, is that affirming the beauty of interracial marriage, especially in real, concrete cases, carries a far greater dignity-affirming wallop than the more subtle threat to minority identity in marrying a person from the majority culture. But one can understand the concern.

That biblical study of interracial marriage that I did in seminary was for me a settling of the matter. I have not gone back from what I saw there. The Bible does not oppose or forbid interracial marriages but, as I will argue in chapter 15, sees them as a positive good for the glory of Christ.

IN THE SHADOW OF DACHAU

I spent the next three years (June 1971 to June 1974) in Germany, taking one trip home for Christmas in 1972. It is difficult to measure the effect of being removed from one’s own country for three years—and feeling oneself becoming part of a much larger reality than America and the American church. Add to that the fact that Germany’s history of horrific racist Nazism was only twenty-six years old. Hitler killed himself the year before I was born.

The Dachau concentration camp, preserved with its “Nie Wieder” (Never Again) memorial, lay ten miles northwest of where we lived in Munich. It was not the place you went for a Sunday outing. But we did go. Barbed wire, barrack rows, triple-decker trough beds, cremation furnaces and hanging rooms, the ostensible shower rooms—they are all there. This was the witness to the belief in the evolutionary superiority of an Aryan “master race.” Living in the literal and figurative shadow of such horrific effects of racism solidified the merciful reorientation of my mind.

FROM SUBURBAN CLASSROOM TO URBAN PARISH

I took my degree from the University of Munich in the summer of 1974 and for the next six years taught Biblical Studies at Bethel College in a suburb of the Twin Cities of Minnesota. They were good years, but God’s call to the pastorate became irresistible in late 1979. One of the impulses was the sense that my classrooms were too distant from the front lines of seeing the gospel change different kinds of people. The students represented a very small slice of humanity.

This is not a criticism. College education is necessarily self-selecting in many ways. Mostly the students will be between eighteen and twenty-two and well educated. I thank God for teachers who are called to give their lives to the task. I am deeply thankful for my own college days at a school much like Bethel.

But in the fall of 1979, the passion to preach and to apply God’s Word to a wider range of people led me to a vocational crisis, and I gave my notice at Bethel and sought a church. In the summer of 1980, I accepted the call to Bethlehem Baptist Church, a 109-year-old center-city church on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. To my mind the location was perfect for the kind of impulses I felt. To the west was the upscale business district. To the north, the Metrodome (just being built) and light industrial district. To the east, the University of Minnesota. And to the south, the poorest and most diverse part of the city—Elliot Park and Phillips neighborhood.

We moved into the city and have lived within walking distance of the church in Elliot Park and Phillips ever since (now almost thirty years). The 2005 ethnic breakdown of our neighborhood was 24.6 percent Caucasian, 29 percent African American, 22 percent Hispanic, 11 percent Native American, 5.9 percent Asian, 7.4 percent other.12 Immigration patterns have changed over the years with various groups swelling and shrinking from time to time. But that is pretty much what I see out of my study window on 11th Avenue South.

ADOPTION AT FIFTY

This is where I wanted to be. And this is where I would like to die. God could move me. But it will take a crystal-clear divine call to make me leave this kind of diversity. Noël and I raised four sons in this neighborhood. We used to joke that the reason we don’t have a television is that the boys can watch the nightly news on the streets outside their house.

Not long after I turned fifty in 1996, Noël got a phone call from a friend and pro-life social worker in Georgia. “I have a little girl here who needs a family,” she said, “I think she’s for you.” Was this the answer to Noël’s prayer for a daughter that so far God had answered with four sons? It was not an easy decision. I was fifty, and this little girl was African American. Starting the parenting role again at age fifty was not in the plan. There were those who thought I was crazy to consider it.

Noël and I took long walks together in those days as we sought the Lord together. Finally, I knew the answer. Love your wife, love this little girl as your own, and commit yourself to the day of your death to the issue of racial harmony. Nothing binds a pastor’s heart to diversity more than having it in his home. That was over fifteen years ago. In those years, we have tried to pursue as a church a deeper and wider racial and ethnic diversity and harmony. (You can see a few of the things we have done in Appendix 2.)

I AM NOT A MODEL MULTIETHNIC URBAN PASTOR

If any of this sounds valiant, don’t be too impressed. I am not a good example of an urban pastor. Because of the way I believe God calls me to use my time, I don’t have significant relationships with most of my neighbors. Nor does our church reflect the diversity of this neighborhood. There is diversity, but nothing like the statistics above.

Probably I could have been far more effective in immediate urban impact in this neighborhood if I had not written books or carried on a wider speaking ministry. Some thank me for this ministry, and others think I have made a mistake. Again, you may see why I cherish and cling to the gospel of Jesus.

The Lord will be my judge someday. I will give an account to him of how I served him. I expect that as he goes down the list of the choices I have made, none will have a perfectly pure motivation, and many will appear as unwise in the bright light of his holiness. I hope I have been a good steward of my gifts and time. But my confidence in the judgment is not in that. It’s in the perfection of Jesus that God has credited to me through faith and in the punishment Jesus endured for me. And I believe there will be in my overall ministry sufficient, imperfect fruits of love that witness that my union with Jesus by faith was real.

I am not writing this book as a successful multiethnic leader. I am not successful. I am not an expert in diversity. If you came looking for the pragmatic silver bullet for the multiethnic congregation, I may as well bid you farewell. I don’t have it. I write because of truth I see in the Scriptures, convictions I have in my mind, and longings I feel in my heart.

I believe that the gospel—the good news of Christ crucified in our place to remove the wrath of God and provide forgiveness of sins and power for sanctification—is our only hope for the kind of racial diversity and harmony that ultimately matters. If we abandon the fullness of the gospel to make racial and ethnic diversity quicker or easier, we create a mere shadow of the kingdom, an imitation. And we lose the one thing that can bring about Christ-exalting diversity and harmony. Any other kind is an alluring snare. For what does it profit a man if he gains complete diversity and loses his own soul?

I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise.

ROMANS 1:14 (KJV)

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.

ACTS 20:28

CHAPTER TWO

THE GOSPEL I LOVE, THE DEBT I OWE, AND THE CHURCH I SERVE

If, as I said in chapter 1, I am not a model multiethnic urban pastor, why am I writing this book? I said, “I write because of truth I see in the Scriptures, and convictions I have in my mind, and longings I feel in my heart.” It may be helpful to spell out some of those truths, convictions, and longings.

I LOVE THE GLORY OF GOD IN THE CROSS OF CHRIST

First, I have come to see that love for the glory of God and reverence for the cross of Christ imply longing for racial and ethnic diversity and harmony in the body of Christ. This is what chapters 7–16 of this book aim to show. I do reverence the cross of Christ and love the glory of God. The cross is the solid foundation of my hope, and the glory of God is the ultimate content of my hope. “We have been justified by faith . . . and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Rom. 5:1–2). Therefore, I long to see the followers of Christ, especially myself, living the kind of lives that advance the cause of Christ-exalting racial diversity and Spirit-enabled racial harmony. I pray this book serves that end.

I HAVE A DEBT TO PAY